Short Story Study For Writers

In the 1880s Brander Matthews said that short stories should be spelt with a hyphen to distinguish between two different forms, which reminds me of the picture book vs picturebook debate.

A short story is a story that is short. A short-story proper derives from the Romantic tradition and has its beginnings in myths and legends. The reader is required to put the extensional world out of mind and deal in and with a kind of underworld, a world of inexplicable strange loops, a mystical world of paradox and ambiguity, of shadows and shifting perspectives governed not by rational order but by intuition and dream logic.

— MARY ROHRBERGER, The Art of Brevity, edited by Per Winther

Two basic characteristics of the short story

Its focus on a basic sense of mystery unsupported by a social framework

Its consequent dependence on formal pattern and structure

Not all short stories are ‘narrative’ in nature. (The same can be said of picture books.) They don’t all follow the basic ‘rules’ of popular storytelling: Weakness/Need, Desire, Opponent, Plan, Battle, Self-revelation and New Equilibrium. Some shorts are simply a sketch or a mood piece. They are pretty much the only form that has garnered an audience who don’t require this. Then again, the best-selling short stories are full, narrative works.

The simple narrative short story is like a novel only much shorter, whereas the short story proper is more like the Romance.

Ways of Categorising Short Stories

In 1952 Ray B. West divided short stories into two types: “realistic” and “symbolic”. The problem with this is that the surface of some highly symbolic short stories is highly realistic.

THE POSTMODERN SHORT STORY

The postmodern short story came in the middle of the 20th century. Stories became anti-stories:

plots lost cause and effect relationships

“reality” appeared in quotation marks

characters were flattened and artifice foregrounded

symbols convoluted upon themselves.

— MARY ROHRBERGER

Raison d’etre of the Short Story

Short story writers question the world of appearances and in that questioning cast doubt on the immediately apparent and, at the same time, signify the timeless universals beyond the extensional world.

In the short story, questioning is embodied in technique, what is questioned is embodied in structure, and answers to the questions are inherent in total meaning.

The structure of a story creates metaphors that move to symbolic levels and embody meaning by means of analogies.

The very shortness of the short story, as well as the necessary artistic devices demanded by this shortness, force it to focus not on the whole of experience (whatever that is) in all its perceptual and conceptual categorization, but rather on a single experience lifted out of the everyday flow of human actuality and active striving, an experience that is lifted out precisely because it is not a slice of that reality, but rather a moment in which “reality” itself is challenged.

— Charles May, The Art of Brevity, edited by Per Winther

May explains that novels, in contrast, are expected to resolve their own crises.

The short story can yield us some single bizarre occurrence of epiphany of terror whose impact would merely be blunted by lengthy realist elaboration.

— Terry Eagleton

Short Stories And Detail

In the short story, detail is transformed into metaphorical significance. In a novel, on the other hand, the particular can remain merely the particular. It exists to make the reader feel he/she knows the experience — to create verisimilitude.

— Charles E. May, The Art of Brevity, edited by Per Winther

It is possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things — a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring — with immense, even startling power.

— Raymond Carver, On Writing

Tips For Writing The Short Story

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.

The Enormous Radio by John Cheever – a new radio broadcasts what’s happening inside nearby apartments.

O, City Of Broken Dreams by John Cheever – a country couple relocate to New York with the empty promise of making it big with a partially completed script for a play. They are taken for mugs by a variety of characters.

The Sutton Place Story by John Cheever – A little girl gets lost through the carelessness of her nurse who leaves the child with a friend of the family’s while she goes to church.

Just One More Time by John Cheever – A story about privilege and how the rich rarely if ever fall to into the depths of poverty that others are born into. This is one of Cheever’s shorter short stories, and has an interesting example of sideshadowing in the final scene.

Clancy In The Tower Of Babel by John Cheever – An Irish immigrant to New York has an accident at his labouring job and eventually finds a job as an elevator operator at a nearby apartment block which, despite its geographic proximity, is completely foreign to Clancy, and his simple life which is in many ways humble.

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill by John Cheever – A good example of a short story in which the protagonist has a small ‘range of change’ (ie. doesn’t really have a true epiphany, though he may seem to.)

Annie Proulx

The Mud Below by Annie Proulx – a critique of toxic masculinity, with the setting and characters of an American rodeo circuit.

In The Pitby Annie Proulx – a man goes to his childhood camp (I’d call it a ‘bach’) to tidy it up and put it on the market, perhaps. There’s a false accusation and though he realises his mistake, there’s no genuine epiphany regarding his own psychology.

The Unclouded Day by Annie Proulx – another Proulx story about the conflict between real rural people and try-hard newcomers. This is a literary take on the typical story found in a Hunting and Fishing magazine, starring a trickster rural main character and a naive townie.

On The Antler by Annie Proulx – a good case study in linking character to setting. Once the rural setting is compromised, this means the end of life as rural folk know it. But like the novel King Rat, some residents actually start to thrive once the environment changes, even if that change is generally for the worse.

Job History by Annie Proulx – a portrait of a Trump voter, but written in the late 1990s. I’m sure Proulx saw President Trump coming a mile off.

The Blood Bay by Annie Proulx – if “Brokeback Mountain” makes you cry, here’s one from the same author that may well make you chuckle.

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx – one of the few short stories to make me cry. Normally, short stories don’t give you time to feel such emotion.

The Wamsutter Wolf by Annie Proulx — Nothing to do with actual wolves — a disturbing story about domestic violence, similar to Katherine Mansfield’s “The Woman At The Store” in plot, but nothing alike in setting or tone.

Dump Junk by Annie Proulx — Kind of like Bridges of Madison County if that were a magical realist fairy tale without the romantic plot.

Man Crawling Out Of Trees by Annie Proulx — a husband and wife relocate to Wyoming but the husband likes it a lot better than the wife does. A seemingly small event ends their marriage.

The Contest by Annie Proulx — in a small town in Wyoming, with an unrealistic number of bars for its minuscule population, the men decide to hold a beard growing contest. This is an example of Annie Proulx’s dark, dry humour.

Richard Yates

Fun With a Stranger by Richard Yates – a portrait of a sad, lonely old school teacher who has lost all sense of fun. Her idea of an end of year celebration is to buy the class each an eraser.

A Glutton For Punishment by Richard Yates – A man is fired from his job and considers keeping this from his wife until he finds another one. But she knows him well, and when he gets home she is able to guess for herself.

Various

The People Across The Canyon by Margaret Millar – Who are the new people who have moved into the house across the canyon? Why is our little girl so interested in spending time with these glamorous and mysterious people?

Louisa, Please Come Home by Shirley Jackson – a chilling tale about a young woman who just leaves home one day and disappear without a trace.

I Am Waiting by Christopher Isherwood – set between the world wars, with perhaps some SF elements, or is this a story about mental illness?

The Great Chain Of Being by Kim Edwards. Well-known for her later novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, Kim Edwards has also written numerous short stories, no doubt inspired by time spent living in various Asian countries. This one is a feminist tale about a woman who eventually manages to break free of the gender restrictions placed upon her in her youth.

Cat Skin by Kelly Link is a modern story with a fairytale feel. It’s what I call batshit. If you would like to go AWOL, read this for reassurance. Or maybe you understand the story better than I do.

A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner — A story of an aged, woman-in-the-attic recluse written in Gothic style.

Paul’s Case by Willa Cather — a young fantasist growing up in Pittsburg does a Psycho (steals money from his job) then relocates to New York City to start a new life and completely reinvent his backstory. Doesn’t end well for him.

Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker — a feminist New York story in a non-feminist era and grandmother of Gillian Flynn’s Cool Girl archetype.

The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane — A midwestern snow storm throws strangers together overnight. One of them is unhinged. This story is an example of naturalism (the literary movement).

The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce — the sort of work that is parodied by Welcome To Night Vale

Old Man Minick by Edna Ferber — A widower learns how to live contentedly after his wife dies unexpectedly before he does. Set in Chicago.

The Killers by Ernest Hemingway — seems nothing special to me now, but remember this was groundbreaking stuff that paved the way for The Godfather and The Sopranos. Gangsters walk among us, the ordinary people.

The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry — a rare example of a twist ending which isn’t basically saying something terrible about humankind.

Flowering Judas by Anne Porter — This short story reminds me of “A Dill Pickle” by Katherine Mansfield. Both stories are clearly about the way in which women are socially acculturated into providing emotional labour for men, but written in a time before such language existed to described the phenomenon.

Mavis Gallant

A Day Like Any Other by Mavis Gallant – This story is interesting to me because of the year it was written. As a modern parent, I hear a lot about how ‘parents these days’ are overprotective of our children, interfering too much in their lives, stunting their emotional development. Yet this is a story of one such mother, and it dates from 1952.

The Picnic by Mavis Gallant – This story is darkly comic, a ‘comedy of manners’, starring an eccentric old French aristocratic woman. The reader is afforded a close-up view into her life via an American family, the Marshalls, Major Marshall being stationed in France after the war.

The Cost Of Living by Mavis Gallant – One character confronts another for some wrong-doing, and in one fell swoop the wrongdoer manages to sully the waters with ease, simply because she’s had so much practice.

The Burgundy Weekend by Mavis Gallant – Lucie and Jerome Girard are due to meet an elderly woman for lunch in Burgundy.

New Zealand Short Stories

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield — A rich girl who lives at the top of a hill spends the entire day preparing for a fancy party. But she leaves her walled garden utopia to deliver leftovers to a bereft wife at the bottom of the hill, who has lost her husband to an accident. Rich girl has an epiphany. She’s not sure what it is, and neither are we.

Bliss by Katherine Mansfield — Bertha spends the afternoon eating mushrooms at Mt Vic with her queer bff, okay so that’s a big maybe, then is shocked to learn at a Bohemian dinner party later that night that her husband is having an affair with her own woman crush.

At The Bay by Katherine Mansfield — The Burnell family are still living in their bungalow near the bay in Wellington, in a house which must be a little too small for all of them. Each character is aligned with another character to juxtapose and compare their various responses to very similar situations. None of the characters learns anything about themselves, but they have each developed strategies for getting on with their day-to-day lives.

Prelude by Katherine Mansfield — The Burnell family move from central Wellington out to the nearby country. This story spans the first week in their new house, focusing on each of the different members of the household, their reactions to their new environment and their deeper longings and fears.

The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield is the third story about the Burnell family. This focuses on the children and their interactions in the playground. They mimic the social elitism of their parents in a story about the untouchable class.

The Voyage by Katherine Mansfield — Young Fenella takes the Picton Boat from Wellington to live with her grandparents after the death of her mother.

The Wind Blows by Katherine Mansfield — A hormonal teenage girl endures an emotionally up-and-down day. Later, that evening, she goes down to the water with her brother, sees a ship in the distance and says goodbye to her childhood.

The Fly by Katherine Mansfield — one of the last written before her own death, this is the tale of two old men, each dealing with his mortality in a different way.

A Dill Pickle by Katherine Mansfield — A single woman meets up with her old boyfriend in a London cafe. She hasn’t seen him in quite some time. Privileged white boy is doing very well for himself. She considers starting something up with him again, but the conversation reveals he’s still a total arse and privilege has only made him worse. So she walks out of the cafe, doomed to be forever alone. He gets over her quickly, which is the exact reason she can’t stand him.

New Dresses by Katherine Mansfield — is considered an early version of the Burnell family who we see later in the Prelude trilogy. Some have said this story feels contrived. I take a close look at why that might be.

The Escape by Katherine Mansfield — a married man and woman take a cart to the train station. They occupy completely different emotional spaces. By the end of the story the husband has learned to disassociate fully from his wife by delving into his fantasy world.

Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield — Would you have reacted as Leila did?

The Tiredness of Rosabel by Katherine Mansfield — Mansfield’s earliest widely published story, about a young woman who works in a hat shop in London. These days she wouldn’t afford her own room — she’d do as I did in London, and be sleeping in a room with three other people!